Art director Theaster Gates is rehabbing culture

In 2006, Theaster Gates took a dilapidated building that once housed a candy store and rebuilt it into a home — his own.

A few years later, he bought two more buildings on the same 6900 block of South Dorchester Avenue and rehabbed them too. They now hold an art and architecture reading room, an art history slide archive, and a temporary artist's residence. Soon, he'll finish a space devoted to black cinema.

Gates isn't buying properties just to make them look good. He's creating new opportunities for culture, and in the process he's making places more vibrant.

Not only have his trio of refurbished buildings become a neighborhood hub called The Dorchester Project, they've inspired other Chicagoans to launch similarly resuscitative cultural spaces, like the Southside Hub of Production, also in Hyde Park, and 6018 North, former MCA curator Tricia Van Eck's experimental performance venue on Kenmore Avenue in Edgewater.

Step by step, house by house, block by block, Gates is showing us how to get it done, and the 38-year-old Chicago native is poised to make an even bigger impact this year through his role as director of the arts and public life initiative for the University of Chicago, where he'll work with the university and South Side communities to redraft the area's cultural blueprint.

Key to these efforts is the university's new Washington Park Arts Incubator, a 15,000-square-foot, mixed-use arts facility on East Garfield Boulevard that opens in November. The university was awarded a $400,000 grant in June to help fund the incubator's programs.

Gates will direct some of the incubator's resources toward an ambitious community effort to remake 55th Street into a dynamic cultural corridor.

To start, he'll bring Washington Park and other area residents together with architects from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; design students from the Illinois Institute of Technology and their professor Marshall Brown; and Smart Museum of Art staff.

"We'll spend the next year in public conversation with these communities, really planning and imagining the future of cultural life on 55th Street," Gates explained by phone from London, where he's installing his solo show at White Cube gallery. "We hope that our Washington Park neighbors, who have lots of ambitions for Washington Park, will be heard, and that their ideas and dreams can be activated."

The ultimate goal for everyone involved, he says, lies in "creating a more economically viable and more sociable place to live." Hear, hear.